The United States and China have resumed trade talks at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Huawei, of course, have been eagerly waiting for Trump and Xi to meet, and it seems that they have caught a good break.
Huawei's future lied largely in the hands of the two governments finding common ground. Fortunately Trump and Xi Jinping have managed to address Huawei's blacklisting, and Trump has allowed Huawei to resume trading with American companies.
According to Trump, the ban did not advance national security which was the sole purpose of putting it on the Commerce Department's list. Huawei is able to now continue working with the likes of Google and Qualcomm, although it still remains on the Commerce Department's Entity List.
Trump was not ready to talk about removing Huawei from the black list altogether. There are clearly still security concerns that perhaps Huawei has nefarious ties to the Chinese government.
I don't want to talk about it now, we're looking at that very carefully. Huawei is very much in play in terms of our country and in terms of intelligence and the intelligence community - we know a lot about Huawei - but I don't want to mention that right now. I just think it's inappropriate. We're not making it other than what I told you... We're going to save that for later.
While Apple has mastered some parts of the software world, you might give App Store as an example, it has been, and is still, first and foremost a hardware company.
Apple doesn't do all the manufacturing of the hardware but they do design pretty much everything themselves. One of the aspects that traditionally Apple was perhaps most successful designing was the aesthetics.
This is Jony Ive's realm. He's been leading Apple's industrial design team for years, and in 2015 became only the third C-level executive (in addition to CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri) in the company as the chief design officer.
Now Ive has decided to end his career with Apple and move aside from the company. The design guru that was named senior vice president of industrial design in 1997 soon after the return of Steve Jobs, and was behind iconic and immortal designs like the iMac, the iPod and of course the iPhone, is leaving to pursue more personal goals.
He is regarded as one of the key influences alongside the late Steve Jobs in the new rise of Apple.
Apple is holding on to Ive until the end of the year, and even after that he will likely work as a contractor for Apple with his new design studio.
Apple Music has reached 60 million paying subscribers, according to services & software boss Eddy Cue.
The number was reportedly confirmed by Cue in French publication Numerama in Paris. It is up from 50 million that had been reported by Apple in May of last year, and also includes users of the service that are currently on a free trial.
Rival Spotify still holds the crown with over 100 million paying subscibers worldwide to its premium tier services. Spotify also counts users who are on a free trial of the service so long as they have provided credit card or other payment details up front.
When you include those who do not pay a subscription fee, Spotify claims more than 217 million users worldwide.
YouTube Music will save up to 500 of your favorite songs so you can access them for Offline listening.
The 'Smart Downloads' feature will automatically download as many as 500 of your favorite songs to your Android device so you can listen to them with poor or no Internet connectivity. It picks songs from the collection that you have 'liked'.
This is similar to an existing feature called Offline Mixtape which creates a mix of songs based on your tastes and downloads them, though they are not necessarily songs you have heard and liked before.
Smart Downloads will only download the songs at night time and while on Wi-Fi. You can manually set the total limit of songs you want downloaded if you have concerns about storage capacity.
Subscribers of the YouTube Music Premium service will have access to the Smart Downloads feature.
DisplayPort has gotten its first major update since March 2016, bringing support for beyond 8K resolution video at high refresh rates.
The new DisplayPort 2.0 triples the video bandwidth performance compared to DisplayPort 1.4a, from 25.92 Gbps to 77.37 Gbps. This enables the new DisplayPort revision to deliver beyond 8K resolutions at high refresh rates, and support for high-dynamic range.
Additionally, DisplayPort 2.0 brings improved support for multiple display configurations, as well as improved user experience with augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) displays, including support for 4K-and-beyond VR resolutions.
As with the previous iteration, DisplayPort 2.0 functions either over a USB-C connector, or the native DP connector.
DP 2.0 is backward compatible with previous versions of DisplayPort and incorporates all of the key features of DP 1.4a, including support for visually lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC) with Forward Error Correction (FEC), HDR metadata transport, and other advanced features.
DisplayPort 2.0 Configuration Examples
Single display resolutions:
One 16K (15360×8460) display @60Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC)
One 10K (10240×4320) display @60Hz and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression)
Dual display resolutions:
Two 8K (7680×4320) displays @120Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC)
Two 4K (3840×2160) displays @144Hz and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression)
Triple display resolutions:
Three 10K (10240×4320) displays @60Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC)
Three 4K (3840×2160) displays @90Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (no compression)
Spotify and Apple became fierce rivals the moment Apple Music was introduced in June, 2015. The (near) trillion dollar company has put immense focus on catching up Spotify's lead in music streaming game, and the fight has only gotten dirtier.
This include Apple pulling all the stops when it comes to exclusives, spending copious amounts of money on advertising, and of course taking advantage of its massive hardware base. It managed to claw itself into the lead in the U.S. but still has a long way to catch worldwide.
Spotify isn't without tricks to protect their beloved #1 spot either, and the most recent of them is to call Apple out for anti-trust behavior.
They've filed an anti-trust complaint to the EU for Apple's so-called 30 percent app tax. That is the 30 percent share that app developers have to pay Apple for purchases in the App Store. This also applies to the first year of subscription purchases after which it is reduced to 15%, which Spotify has called monopolistic.
Obviously Apple doesn't agree with Spotify's view of the situation, but furthermore they are now suggesting that Spotify doesn't even pay the 30%.
According to Music Business Worldwide, Apple says that Spotify isn't paying what they claim. In fact, according to Apple's response, Spotify hasn't paid any additional commission one any subscribers obtained via the App Store for three straight years.
Microsoft's success with their Surface lineup was in doubt right from the beginning. The company was in the midst of failing their mobile platform, and these new tablet devices weren't anything special either.
Gladly Microsoft didn't give up Surface like they did with smartphones, so that we can have some of the best laptop, tablet, and convertible devices around.
The company has been trying to create products that truly fill in the gap between the traditional laptop and the tablet, and their next product might be the one that does it in a way none have even tried.
Market research firm IHS Markit suggests that Microsoft is developing a new type of Surface product that features things like a dual-screen, Windows 10, as well as support for Android apps.
According to a report by Forbes, the device would feature two 9-inch displays, and it would be a foldable, ie. clamshell, design. The Windows 10 planned for the device is a new WCOS (Windows Core OS) version which supports the dual displays.
The specs are said to include a new Intel system-on-a-chip, codename Lakefield, which is built with 10 nm technology. Furthermore this new Surface would include support for iCloud as well as LTE or 5G connectivity.
OLED panels started as a quirky feature mostly on some Samsung Galaxy phones years ago. They provided better blacks and contrast but not really many other advantages compared to LCD displays.
Now years later they've become the de facto display technology for the higher end mobile devices, and for a good reason. They use less power, offer saturated colors, and amazing contrast. So it's only natural that manufacturers are trying to expand them to larger devices as time goes on.
While OLED TVs already exist, they are way beyond regular people's comfortable price range. However, the laptops are already getting more and more OLED displays, and Apple might be soon in that boat too.
According to Korean ETNews, Apple is planning on moving to OLED screens in some of their upcoming Mac products. The iPhone already made the move with iPhone X, and one could expect that iPads are on their way too.
They reason for the move might not be what you think, though. ETNews suggests that Apple has been promising to purchase OLED panels more than it has required due to slowing iPhone sales.
Another possibility is that Apple will turn their entirely iPhone lineup next time around to OLED. Previous XR model didn't feature an OLED screen, and it was a big seller.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates cites the dominance of Android in the mobile space as his greatest mistake in the Redmond firm's history.
Speaking with TechCruch, Gates spoke about the "winner-take-all" markets that exist in the software world, saying that there is only room for one non-Apple operating system. Of course, that operating system is Android, and Gates claims it is worth about $400 billion.
"So, you know, the greatest mistake ever is the whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is, [meaning] Android is the standard non-Apple phone form platform," Gates told TechCruch.
"That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win."
While Gates did acknowledge that Microsoft is still very much a leader in the software space with assets like Windows and Office performing strongly, he bemoans the fact that Microsoft really messed up in the mobile space, which makes sense given that Windows Mobile precedes Android by many years.
"So this idea that just small differences can magnify themselves doesn't exist for a lot of businesses. You know, if you're a service business, it doesn't exist. But for software platforms, it's absolutely gigantic. And so that's partly where you have the mentality of every night you think, 'Am I screwing this up?' And eventually, we did screw up a super important one."
Rumors have suggested for quite a while that Microsoft is readying up not only a next-generation Xbox, which is undeniable at this point, but in fact two different versions of it.
While Microsoft did reveal some new information about the upcoming Xbox, Project Scarlett as they call it for now, but they didn't touch the subject of multiple devices.
However, according to an interview by Business Insider, there will only be one next-gen Xbox.
This doesn't nullify the previous rumors entirely, even though Xbox boss Phil Spencer jokingly suggests that the first one was the previous genration disc-less Xbox and the second one is Project Scarlett device.
There in fact was a plan to introduce two distinct Project Scarlett devices but that plan has now been scrapped.
These devices were known as codename Anaconda and Lockhart, and they woudld've differed in both performance and price. Anaconda was the proper next-gen console while Lockhart was planned as the slighter improvement over current Xbox One S.
The new move by Microsoft seems to be to offer lower-cost gaming with their new xCloud cloud gaming platform rather than a cheaper next-gen console.
The true love of the geeks, the miniature computer Raspberry Pi, has been upgraded to a new major version. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B changes pretty much everything there was in the previous version - and to the better.
Previous flagship model, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ sold for $35 and the same base price remains for the new model, too. But the components, connectors and everything else have gone through a major revamp.
First of all, the system chip has been updated. Raspberry Pi 4 now uses Cortex-A72 system chip with quadcore architecture, running at 1.5GHz. New chip has built-in H.265 video decoding ability, just to mention one of the perks of the new chip.
Previous Raspberry Pis have shipped either with 512MB or 1GB or RAM, but the new model takes a leap forward here, too. The cheapest option ships with 1GB of RAM, but you can also get a version with either 2GB or 4GB of RAM. Furthermore, the memory tech has been upgraded from previous LPDDR2 to LPDDR4 tech, meaning that the memory is also significantly faster than previously.
A petition doing the rounds seeking the removal of a 'blasphemous' show from Netflix is met with amusement and ridicule.
There have been many such petitions shared around social media that demand streaming services remove content that offers certain groups of people. In that sense, this is nothing new. However, when you want a streaming service to remove a show from their platform, make sure that the show is actually on their platform.
It turns out that the petition - posted by Christian group Return To Order - was demanding that Netflix remove 'Good Omens' from its platform, despite the fact that Good Omens is actually a show on Amazon Prime. At its height the petition gathered about 35,000 signatures, but unfortunately they seem to have now removed it, undoubtedly prompted by the ridicule.
"This is another step to make Satanism appear normal, light and acceptable," the organization noted on its website originally, according to BGR.
"We must show our rejection. Please sign our petition, telling Netflix that we will not stand silent as they destroy the barriers of horror we still have for evil."
A service that cleaned out objectionable material from Hollywood films and streamed them to customers is ordered to pay studios for copyright infringement.
VidAngel would buy physical DVD copies of films and then manually remove sexual content, violence, profanity and other stuff that isn't considered family-friendly. It would then offer the sanitized version of the film for streaming through its online service.
The operators of the website believed the practice was entirely legal under the Family Entertainment And Copyright Act, which provides legal safe haven for tech products and services that are used to censor aspects of films.
However, U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte had previously ruled that VidAngel's service was illegal and ordered the service shut down in December 2016. This only left a jury decision on damages up in the air.
Hollywood heavyweights Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. had requested the jury impose the maxiumum $125 million penalty for illegally streaming 819 separate movies. Meanwhile, the VidAngel defense attorney asked the jury only to impose the minimum $600,000 penalty, arguing that VidAngel CEO Neal Harmon was genuinely under the impression the service was legal under federal law.
Only a couple of days after Facebook and partners announced Libra, a U.S. Senate panel has already scheduled a hearing probing the proposed virtual currency.
Libra is a proposed permissioned blockchain virtual currency backed by Facebook and a wide range of partners that make up the Libra Association. While it doesn't have banks among its members, it does include MasterCard and PayPal.
When the virutal currency (sometimes called cryptocurrency, although it is quite different to Bitcoin and others) was announced by Facebook this week, it was immediately met with concerns over data usage and other things.
Maxine Waters, the U.S. Representative for California's 43rd congressional district, who oversees the House Financial Services Committee, called on Facebook to halt the development of the product. She wanted the U.S. congress and federal regulators to have time to examine the proposal.
Today the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs has scheduled a hearing for July 16, 2019. The hearing is described as, "Examining Facebook's Proposed Digital Currency and Data Privacy Considerations."
While the Banking Committee website says that witnesses will be announced at a later date, Reuters reports that David Marcus, who heads up Facebook's blockchain efforts, will be one of them.
Earlier this week, Samsung raised eyebrows by sharing a video instructing users of its smart TVs to run virus scans on them regularly.
Samsung's smart TVs run on the Linux-based Tizen operating system. We are all familiar with running anti-malware software and even running virus scans on your PCs if we have suspicions. Samsung posted a tweet with an embedded video to its Samsung Support USA account reminding users that the same practice should apply to their televisions.
"Scanning your computer for malware viruses is important to keep it running smoothly. This also is true for your QLED TV if it's connected to Wi-Fi," the tweet reads.
"Prevent malicious software attacks on your TV by scanning for viruses on your TV every few weeks."
An embedded 19-second video then guided users through a process using the remote control to access a sub-menu to activate virus checks. The video and tweet have since been removed by Samsung.
That is likely due to unexpected responses that ranged from users excmlaiming that this is an example of why you shouldn't connect your TV to Wi-Fi at all, to others pointing out that it's pointless advice because the TVs typically come loaded with specialized smart TV-focused McAfee security software that runs in the background.
The proposed age verification system for controlling access to adult entertainment websites (the UK's 'porn block') has reportedly been shelved indefinitely.
With the goal of attempting to protect underage Internet users from adult-oriented content, the UK government has been planning to implement an age verification system. It has already been delayed twice as it faces considerable criticism.
Sky News reports that Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Secretary Jeremy Wright will inform the Parliament that the system has been shelved for now. It was supposed to go into effect on July 15.
According to Sky sources, the issue was bureacratic, rather than technical.
Ever since it was first proposed in 2015 and has proceeded since, it has faced criticism. Understandably, it raised privacy concerns as the habits of Internet users could be tracked. It also had the potential to open people up to blackmail.
On top of that, some in the adult entertainment industry decried the fact that social media platforms like Tumblr or Twitter were to be exempt, meaning the producers of the content would be behind the block while the content could be easily accessible on those platforms.
Apple and Best Buy have announced a partnership to provide Apple-certified repairs for iPhones, iPads etc. at almost 1,000 stores across the United States.
Apple-certified repairs at an Apple store or an authorized service provider are performed by trained experts who use genuine Apple parts. Every repair is backed by Apple. With its partnership with Best Buy and authorized third party service providers, eight out of ten Apple customers will be within 20 minutes of an authorized service provider.
Best Buy's Geek Squad has nearly 7,600 newly Apple-certified technicians ready to make same-day iPhone repairs or to service other Apple products. Aside from Best Buy, there are over 1,800 third-party Apple authorized service providers in the US.
This will help Apple customers who are located hours away from the closest Apple store.
"At Apple, we're dedicated to providing the best customer service in the world," said Tara Bunch, Apple's vice president of AppleCare.
"If a customer ever needs to repair their products, we want them to feel confident those repairs are done safely and correctly. We're always looking at how we can reliably expand our network of trained technicians and we're excited to partner with every Best Buy store so it's even easier for our customers to find an authorized repair location near them."
YouTube and Universal Music Group are to remaster just under 1,000 music videos with HD picture and improved audio.
YouTube likely houses the largest collection of music videos publicly available. A lot of these music videos are older and were shot and produced for tube televisions. On top of that, some of the audio quality of older music videos lags because a lot were intended for televisions with mono speakers.
From today, over 100 music videos that have been remastered to much higher video and audio quality can be found on YouTube, with the rest of almost 1,000 videos expected to be finished by the end of the year. Every week will see new remastered videos.
They will be available from the same URL as always and will be marked with a "Remastered" label in the description.
Videos that have already been remastered and are available are from artists including titles from Billy Idol, Beastie Boys, Boyz II Men, George Strait, Janet Jackson, Kiss, Lady Antebellum, Lady Gaga, Lionel Richie, Maroon 5, Meat Loaf, No Doubt/Gwen Stefani, Smokey Robinson, The Killers, Tom Petty and more.
The social media giant has partnered with dozens across industries in its ambitious plans to bring about a global cryptocurrency during the first half of 2020.
Along with partners that include MasterCard and PayPal, it has established the Libra Association, based in Geneva. Banks are curiously not among the listed partners for the Libra Association so far. The association will govern the global Libra cryptocurrency, while at the same time a Facebook subsidiary called Calibra will offer digital wallets.
Digital wallets allow consumers to store, receive and send cryptocurrency units.
Facebook and its partners are aiming the Libra system at both established commerce but also aim to offer financial services to some consumers in the world who previously have had no access to such services. It isn't likely to be an easy ride for Facebook and friends however, as scrutiny immediately followed the announcement of Libra.
Digital rights and privacy activists have raised concerns over how much more private data can be amassed by Facebook as it facilitates payments and transactions around the world. The social media giant has a very spotty record when it comes to the use of user data already.
Huawei has been all over the news recently, thanks to Trump administration blacklisting the company.
It is becoming increasingly hard to be competitive for Huawei if the blacklist goes into full effect and U.S. as well as many European ones can't or won't do business with them.
There's still ways for Huawei to avoid this, and even Trump's Treasury Secretary has noted that Huawei might be cleared off the blacklist if negotiations go appropriately.
For Huawei tariffs are the least of their problems. Things like not having an operating system (Android) or processors for their smartphones is far greater problem than losing some of the profitability, and they are preparing for that too.
Apple has never really been one to bridge the gap between operating systems, ecosystems, and platforms.
The company's stronghold over things like iMessage are essentially keeping people locked into iOS, although arguments could be made its totally escapable.
However, there might be some light at the end of the tunnel, as Apple seems to be more willing to expand some of its services to competing platforms. After all, for example, Apple Music is available on Android and iTunes (later replaced with Apple TV after iTunes was effectively killed) was released earlier this year for LG and Samsung TVs
Now iCloud is making its way to competing operating systems. Apple and Microsoft have become closer partners, and Apple has released iCloud for Windows 10's Microsoft Store.
While you could've been using iCloud on Windows all along, there hasn't been an iCloud app in the Microsoft Store for it.
With the new iCloud app for Windows you can easily sync your data to the cloud using File Explorer. It supports iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, as well as Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Tasks, and Bookmarks. For Mail, Contacts, Calendars you'll need Outlook 2016 or later.
According to Wall Street Journal, Nintendo has started producing their next-generation game console, two of them to be exact. This means the dual successor to highly successful Nintendo Switch is just around the corner.
It also means that current trade issues between China and the U.S. might really affect where and how it is manufactured and shipped.
Nintendo is reportedly ready for the effects the trade war might have with their products, and has already moved some of the manufacturing out of China. This will allow them to avoid profit killing tariffs.
While officially Nintendo hasn't commented on this, they do say that majority of Switch manufacturing is located in China.
Not only is Nintendo avoiding China but, according to Bloomberg, Google is moving some of its production out of the country. Google's smart home division Nest is manufacturing more of the devices in Taiwan and Malaysia.
Apple's rise to the top with the iPhone was nothing short of miraculous, but things haven't necessarily been going as great after Steve Jobs passed, although they are again closing in on that $1 trillion.
Market cap was rising until it hit a trillion dollars last year, but since it has hit some big roadblocks.
One of them was the failure with 5G. Apple's sole modem partner was Intel, who completely flopped with their 5G modem development. Not only were they late to the party, but they eventually had to pull out entirely.
However, the partnership with Qualcomm is definitely not what Apple would consider optimal. They would much rather not work with the company that makes most Android modems, and have either an exclusive partner or, better yet, produce their own modem.
Mozilla's Firefox has been in a slow and painful decline ever since Google announced their own web browser, Chrome, approximately 10 years ago.
Not only has Firefox's market share been cut in third but the company has become increasingly dependent on search engine partnerships and the royalties they provide.
That's why the company has just announced a new premium version of Firefox. A massive move from the company that has provided, and keeps providing, a free to use web browser.
While the premium Firefox is only going to hit the testers this fall, the company has already revamped Firefox's image quite a bit.
Mozilla has also determined that in the future Firefox will encompass not only the browser but a larger group of software, including Firefox Send, Firefox Monitor, and Firefox Lockwise. Thus, it is only reasonable that the browser be called Firefox Browser from now on.
Well, whether you'll be calling it that (you won't), that is indeed the official name. It also means that Firefox has gotten a brand new logo that spans over all the apps.
As you can see below, Firefox the brand has a different logo than the browser, but the two are completely different from Send, Monitor, and Lockwise.
Not many of the younger generation of photographers know what developing a photo is like. However, apparently the ones that have learned about it are interested.
There's interest enough for Fujifilm to bring back photographic film to the market. The company has started producing a new version of its iconic black-and-white Acros photo film.
The new product is called Neopan 100 Acros II. They are producing both a 35 mm as well as 120 film variants of this monochrome technology that we thought had been largely forgotten.
This nearly 200 years old method of photography has some new technology inserted in it. According to Fujifilm, a new Super Fine-Σ technique improves the sharpness and produces a more fine graininess compared to the original Neopan 100 Acros.
Fujifilm will start selling the film in Japan this fall and expansion is in store if there is demand.
The best example of the escalation of the trade war between China and the U.S. is of course Trump blacklisting world's number two smartphone manufacturer and top 5G competitor Huawei.
However, there is no trade war where there is no retaliation. China has warned that it is willing to blacklist companies in America, and elsewhere, who abide by what Huawei calls unconstitutional ban.
Furthermore general trade war actions, like tariffs, could damage other companies as well. One of the main ones in the line of fire is of course Apple, who've had troubles in China.
Fortunately Apple's key supplier Hon Hai, better known here as Foxconn, is assuring investors that drastic trade war acts are not going to leave Apple without iPhones, Bloomberg reports.
According to Foxconn, they have all the necessary facilities to keep on producing iPhones for American consuming needs. Thus, even if the trade war would escalate further and make it necessary to build iPhones outside China, that is possible according to the Taiwanese contract manufacturer.
Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has revealed a rather strange development for the web browser developers. The company responsible for the popular Firefox browser is going to be releasing a premium version of the browser.
At this point he doesn't reveal what kind of price people are required to pay to access this new piece of Mozilla software, but needless to say it will include some improvements over the free version.
In an interview with Germal publication t3n, Beard says that the new version might include things like integrated VPN service as well as free and safe cloud storage, although not all features have yet been decided.
He ensures that in no universe is Mozilla going to get rid of the free version, however. This also won't affect the new features that have already been promised to the free version in upcoming updates.
Firefox has lost much of its traction to Google's Chrome over the years, and it currently hold the second place in market share with measly 10%, when it topped 30% around ten years ago before Chrome.
According to the company this is one of the ways it is seeking new revenue streams.
AMD had their E3 press event yesterday where they revealed finally the upcoming GPUs based on the new Navi architecture.
They company had already initially revealed the new generation of GPUs at Computex, but this time around we got some dearly needed details.
AMD's newly announced Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700 are the new champs that challenge Nvidia's midrange RTX series cards. RX 5700 is aiming to challenge the RTX 2060 with a compelling $379 price tag.
The XT version is going to perhaps challenge the RTX 2070 with a bit pricier $449.
Both will be available from July 7 onwards.
AMD told us that RX 5700 XT features 40 compute units and 2560 stream processors that produce up to 9.75 teraflops, and 8 gigabytes of GDDR6 memory that can reach up to 1905 MHz boost clock speed (and 1605 MHz base clock).
The cheaper RX 5700 has 36 compute units, 2304 stream processors with up to 7.95 teraflops, and same 8 gigs of GGDR6 with a lower 1725 MHz boost clock (and 1465 MHz base clock).
If you are wondering whether the new Navi cards support ray tracing like their Nvidia counterparts, that is a definite no, and it's likely that they'll wait until the next generation to properly implement it. Even then the full scene ray tracing is going to be a cloud solution.
Microsoft launched the new Xbox Game Pass PC at their E3 press event very much as expected. The $5 a month service offers free games to PC gamers, and you can try it out now for an introductory monthly fee of $1.
In addition Microsoft introduced a new Game Pass tier for all to subscribe to. Previously only available for testers, the Game Pass Ultimate offers Xbox Live Gold, Xbox Game Pass as well as the newest addition Game Pass PC.
All three services bundled in one costs you $14.99 a month, which is a bargain if you intend to get them all. Separately they would cost around $25.
Microsoft has said that Game Pass PC will include over 100 games from 75 different developers, similarly to the Xbox version. In addition to free games, subscribers get a 20 percent discount towards other games on Microsoft Store and 10 percent discount from DLC.
The U.S. government's blacklisting of Huawei could have disastrous consequences to the world's second largest smartphone manufacturer, but the worst hasn't still gone into effect, and we might even see some backtracking from the Trump administration.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has revealed that the president might ease the restrictions if upcoming trade negotiations with China go well, Reuters reports.
This makes it even more clear that with the blacklist trade war is a large part of it, not only a national security aspect that Mnuchin also highlights. China has also suggested that it might be ready to respond in kind to what it considers an act of trade war.
While Huawei has been targeted by the U.S. government for years national security grounds, and this has meant that Huawei hasn't had an opening to enter the very closed U.S. smartphone market, Trump escalated it by requiring U.S. companies to halt business with the Chinese company altogether.
One of Microsoft's core competencies lies in the cloud, and they've been trying to leverage that know-how in creating the next-generation gaming platform for quite a while.
In the meantime companies like Google have been doing exactly the same thing, and even managed to officially release their product. Microsoft obviously has to worry about their stil very physical Xbox business, but they are soon ready to expand to the cloud with a new service.
Microsoft's streaming game platform xCloud is going to be ready for testing this fall, the company revealed at their E3 event. The public testing of the platform will begin in October.
You'll be able to test both Xbox games you own as well as games on Xbox Game Pass with the new service. While there's no expansive list of supported devices or platforms, Microsoft has assured that xCloud will be made available widely across different platforms.
This suggests that you'll be able to play on big screens, mobile devices, and everything in the middle. Microsoft and Sony striking a deal on cloud services also suggests that Sony devices are likely to support xCloud.
Our dear website, AfterDawn, officially launched in 10th of June, 1999. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we start a year-long project to look back what news we covered back in 1999 - 2000. We'll publish these collections once a month, covering a month years earlier on, with modern perspective on events happened back then.
At this point, it is also time to remind you, our readers, that AfterDawn didn't start out as a "general tech website", but instead, our core focus was on digital audio technology (MP3s, most notably, and how to encode, edit and play them) and digital video. As the decades have passed, our focus has also changed to cover other things. But during these first years, it was all about digital audio and video.
And yeah, we didn't produce many news in our early days, as AfterDawn's original idea was - and still is - to be a "portal" where you can get various types of information. Back in 1999, that meant we published guides, news and software downloads. But hey, we also provided free hosting for independent artists' MP3 tracks and, at some point in time, offered a quite large collection of WinAMP skins for users to download.
And damn, our news articles weren't too long, either :-)
Software update: WinDAC
In June, 1999, we covered handful of major software updates in our news. One of those was a recent update to a CD audio ripper program called WinDAC. As the name implies, the Windows-based software was meant to copy the contents of an audio CD to a PC hardware. Back then, this was done by storing the data in WAV format, which user later could edit and compress (encode) to a smaller format, such as MP3.
As expected, E3 started with a bang from Microsoft. The company revealed the first details about their upcoming, next-generation Xbox console.
While Sony has been revealing some tidbits about their PS5 already, Microsoft has been fairly quite until now. Microsoft's upcoming Xbox doesn't have an official name yet, not one that we know about, but they did give us some impressive specs to look forward to.
The device we still know as Project Scarlett is extremely powerful. According to Microsoft it can perform up to four times faster than current generation Xbox One X.
This means that the upcoming Xbox will no only provide 120 FPS framerates but up to 8K resolution. In addition it will support variable refresh rate and the state-of-the-art lighting effect known as ray-tracing, popularized by new GeForce RTX cards.
It's based upon the AMD Zen 2 processor architecture and new RDNA GPU architecture, which means that you'll get super fast GDDR6 memory. As expected, Microsoft will move from HDD storage to much, much faster SSD.
It all started in winter 1998/1999. It was one of the coldest winters in Finnish history with temperatures dropping to record low of -51C in Northern parts of the country. There was this slightly bored web developer, with too many easy job tasks at hand, dreaming about doing something of his own to the Internet.
After months of thinking it through, a vision of a website dedicated to all things about MP3s was taking a shape. The idea was to build a website that would combine all aspects of the trendy new technology under one umbrella: news about the tech, guides on how to use the tech, software downloads to help to follow the guides provided and a place for indie artists to publish their songs, in MP3 format, for free.
Drafting the plans, the realism hit hard. Building - and maintaining - such a site on my own seemed like an impossible task. The thinking was, that once the novelty of the project would wane, the project would be left to die, if running the site on my own. Furthermore, back in those days, there weren't open source CMS systems, free picture galleries, WordPress themes to pick from or anything like that. Nope, you had to build the entire site from the scratch, on your own, including all its backend systems, design, etc. And yeah, hosting, even a medium-sized website would cost something like $100 a month back then. I was in my 20s and quite poor, to be honest.
The U.S. government's blacklisting of Huawei has resulted in fairly dire consequences for the Chinese smartphone giant. Many of the American, as well as some European, companies have stopped, or will stop, working with Huawei.
Now another U.S. top brand is shying away from supporting Huawei. Facebook has announced that it will no longer provide their apps for pre-installation on Huawei devices.
This means that no Huawei comes with Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp installed at the factory. However, it doesn't ban the apps from being installed, or updated, by the user. At least as long as Huawei phones retain the ability to use Google Play.
According to atw, the policy applies to all the phone units that haven't yet been shipped, including smartphone models that have been in stores before the blacklist.
Obviously this isn't the worst of the blacklist consequences but it sure doesn't help Huawei's standing against other Android brands. First and foremost the problems will come with Google and Android and perhaps after that from chip manufacturers and designers like Qualcomm and ARM.
If there is one company that has inspired people about robotics in the recent years, it is most certainly Boston Dynamics.
The former Google X company, know owned by Japanese Softbank, has been creating more and more nimble and smart robots in different humanoid and animal forms over the years, and we've been able to follow their journey with videos that nearly always go viral.
However, these robots have so far only been research prototypes.
Now according to The Verge, Boston Dynamics is readying an actual launch to consumer markets. To be launched is one of the more impressive creations: the dog-like, and aptly named, Spot.
Spot is being currently tested in different possible consumer environments and might hit the shelves in the coming months, or at least before 2020. Boston Dynamics aims to produce a thousand Spot units by the end of the year.
We've previously seen videos of Spot running in different terrain and perhaps most controversially being kicked to show how Spot holds its balance.
There's no word on price yet, but most likely it's going to cost you quite a bit more than a cleaning robot. However, Boston Dynamics' CEO Marc Raibert said that it might cost less than some of our four-legged friends.
Apple has been rumored to be working on self-driving cars for ages. Many believe it's just a matter of time before Apple reveals their own Tesla killer.
Now they are ready to many another move towards their own AI-driven vehicle, as The Information reports that Apple is closing in on buying Drive.ai.
Drive.ai is, as you might guess from the name, a company developing autonomous driving. It was established by students from Stanford and is headquartered near Google in Mountain View, CA.
The hundred strong Drive.ai will likely mostly move to work for Apple after the acquisition, and know-how is what Apple is really after, not current prototypes or patents.
The company was founded in 2015 and secured $12 million in funding in 2016 and $50 million the following year in the second round.
Stadia will indeed provide games at up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with both HDR an 5.1 sound support. To access all that among the first you'll have to acquire the Founder's Edition of Stadia as it lands in November, which will cost you an initial $129.
That gives you the Stadia controller, Chromecast Ultra as well as three months of subscription to Stadia Pro. Further subscription costs $9.99/mo.
Stadia Pro also offers occasionally free games, starting with Destiny 2: The Collection, as well as discounts on others. There also will be a free Stadia available next year with Full HD (1080p) games at 60fps and stereo sound without HDR support. The free tier won't include free games or discounts.
We also got to finally know a little more about available games. Google revealed that at least the upcoming list of games will come to Stadia.
Google's upcoming cloud gaming platform seems pretty impressive if you trust that Google can indeed deliver quality it has promised.
The search giant getting into the cloud gaming space has even gotten Sony and Microsoft worried. In fact so much so that they've started working together to provide better cloud services.
The one thing that worries many of us, in addition to Google not managing to deliver on low latency and good quality, is that the prices are just way out there.
Well, thanks to Canadian La Presse, we've got some leaked pricing details to lay our eyes upon.
According to the information leaked, not every game is going to be included in a subscription fee. Instead some of them need to be bought separately. In Canada, the service, called Stadia Pro, is said to cost $11.99/mo and it offers 4K gaming with 60 fps framerate.
Minimum internet connetion requirement is stated at 10/1 Mbps but to enjoy the 4K@60fps you'll need at least 35 Mbps down.
Games that are expected initially on Stadia include the likes of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Doom, The Division 2, Destiny 2, and three Tomb Raider titles. However, there's no word whether these will be included with the monthly fee or sold separately.
Apple's perhaps strongest part of the business is not iPhones or iPads themselves but the App Store, which keeps on printing money with royalties.
However, there might be a problem with how Apple conducts its business regarding to the App Store.
Supreme Court recently decided that Apple is in fact a participant in and responsible for the app selling business, even though it argued, and continues to do so, that it is only in business with the app developer that pays the commissions, not selling the apps to the customer.
After the Supreme Court opened Apple to be sued for antitrust violations by customers, we expected several to be hitting the courts in the coming days, weeks, and months.
It is bound to happen from the customers too, but today we have us a case against App Store by app developers.
The plaintiffs include developers from a baby naming app and a basketball workout app who argue that the Cupertino company "stifles innovation" with its policies, Yahoo! Finance reports.
One of the leading game conferences is upon us. Los Angeles' own E3 starts next week, and while there's tons of exciting game content to behold your eye on, one important piece of the video game puzzles is not attending.
Sony has said a while ago that it won't be going to E3 this year. Therefore we won't see PS5 sneak peaks at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
However, worry not. Sony has decided that it still wants to take some of the limelight ahead of the convention. In an interview with CNET, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has revealed some new information about PlayStation 5.
As we've already learned, the successor to PlayStation 4 will include things like a speedier SSD storage instead of the obsolete HDD technology. Now Ryan has revealed that PS5 will also support gaming in 4K and 120hz (or 120fps).
4K gaming has been here for a while thanks to PS4 Pro but increasing the framerate to 120 is a big upgrade. Not only is it double of PS4 Pro max framerate but many of the 4K games can't output even 60fps.
Ryan also confirmed that game saves will move from console generation to another seamlessly, thanks to cloud storage.
PlayStation Now will be revamped this year, too. Competing platforms like Google's new Stadia cloud gaming platform have made Sony push even harder in the cloud, so much so that they've announced partnership with Microsoft, who's thought to be the arch rival of Sony in this space.
Apple announced a lot of things earlier this week at their annual Worldwide Developer Conference, some of them less of a surprise than others. One thing we already knew about was that Apple was going to kill iTunes on Mac, like it has done on iOS.
Apple replaced iTunes with new Music, Podcasts, and TV apps and thus iTunes is no longer. Well, it's no longer available on iOS or macOS, but you can still use it if you really, really want.
One place you'll still find iTunes on is Windows. Thus, Apple is not going kill iTunes in its entirety, but just replacing it on all of its own platforms.
In an interview with ArsTechnica, Apple confirmed that Windows version of iTunes is not going to change for now, and there are no updates announced for it.
However, one can imagine that this isn't going to last forever. Apple is trying to get rid of its bloated app and one of its least liked brands, and this will eventually mean that the three aforementioned apps will replace iTunes on Windows too.
Do not expect the iTunes experience to get better on Windows, and for it to be eventually replaced by separate apps.
One of the things that we didn't get to tell you about yet is the new macOS update, which has some interesting improvements and additions as well.
Like many of us have suspected, Apple has been working on unifying the mobile and desktop experience behind the scenes for quite a while. This doesn't yet mean that all the desktop features are going to be found on mobile and vice versa, although some are making their way already to iPadOS.
For most of us the annual OS upgrades are the most meaningful announcements at Apple's WWDC. However, some people have been waiting for a professional grade computer from Apple for ages, and they finally got some exciting news this year.
Apple announced the new Mac Pro, which returns to its previous cheese grater design before the 2013 trash can. The computer is as nutty when it comes to maxed out specs as is it's asking price even at the low end, $6,000.
However, many of the pros also need a high-end professional display to go with the professional grade computer. Fortunately Apple announced a new display alongside its Mac Pro.
The new Pro Display XDR specs are out of this world, too. The 32-inch display features 6K resolution, 6016 by 3384 pixels, at 218 PPI. It has 1000 nits continuous full screen brightness and 1600 nits peak.
The XDR moniker comes from eXtreme Dynamic Range, and that is exactly what you get with a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1, which is insane for an LCD. Color-wise it features P3 wide color gamut and 10-bit depth for 1.073 billion colors.
The bulk of Apple's this week's WWDC keynote was taken by new OS announcements, including iOS 13 and the new iPadOS.
However, one thing that most of us will probably never get, or even see, caught the attention of us all. Apple's new Mac Pro.
Apple is finally releasing a replacement for their modular computer aimed at professionals. The previous one is the iconic trash can Mac Pro from 2013, and now they've introduced a new one with a brand new design.
The design itself is controversial, after all it does look exactly like a cheese grater pretty much like the one before the trash can, but it's also pricey beyond mere mortals.
It starts at $6,000, and no one knows how high the price goes when you jack it up with everything they've got.
The system includes a 8/12/16/24/28 core Intel Xeon processor and 12 DIMM slots for up to 1.5 TB of RAM. It starts with one AMD Radeon Pro 580X and can be suited with up to four AMD Radeon Pro Vega 2 cards. There's 8 PCI slots, four full and four half-sized, up to 4 TB of SSD storage, and a 1400 watt PSU.
As expected, Apple released a new version of their mobile operating system at WWDC earlier this week. However, they also announced another mobile operating system, solely meant for iPad.
Apple has been trying to convince customers for a long time now that iPad is actually going to replace PCs. Not many Apple commercials are as controversial at the one where a kid using an iPad asks "What's a computer?"
Not only is iPad a computer but also it is nowhere near replacing a proper one. You know, one with a file system and I/O support worth anything.
Now Apple has unveiled the new iPadOS. Starting in iOS 13, also announced at WWDC, iPhone and iPad software aren't exactly alike anymore.
Unfortunately iPadOS is still a fork of iOS and shares almost everything with iPhone's operating system. It's definitely not yet a computer operating system with aforementioned features.
However, there are some improvements that take it more to that direction. Multitasking has been improved, which means that you can make multiple instances of the same app and use them in separate Spaces. Also, while file system is still crippled by iOS DNA, file management is better thanks to improved Files app with support for USB storage and SD cards.
Apple's this years WWDC is now behind us with all it's impressive, or less impressive, product launches and fresh updates.
One of the most anticipated was of course the new version of iOS. Apple's mobile operating system was updated to version 13, and it bring a few very welcome new features.
Clearly one of the top features is the new dark mode, which finally turns the entire OS into a darker version of itself. This was already leaked a few days ahead the official announcement of course.
Dark mode is of course good for your eyes in the dark, but it also has battery saving qualities on OLED screens. OLED screens can be found on iPhone X and iPhone XS for example.
Many of the other new features in iOS 13 have to do with performance. Apple has continued the theme of iOS 12, improving performance, to the most current update. This time around app packaging has been improved, making them 50% smaller. Also updates are said to be more efficiently packed and they are an average of 60 percent smaller.
Not only are you saving space and download time, you'll see a performance improvement in app start times. According to Apple you can expect as much as twice faster loading speeds.
Next week's World Wide Developer Conference is bound to be a premiere for some new Apple services and software, but according to new information it'll also be the deathbed of one of the longest running brands within Apple.
Apple's annual developer conference starts next Monday, and we expect at least macOS, iOS, and watchOS updates. In addition, we'll see a change in terms of apps.
Rumors have it that the company is on its way to combine iOS and macOS app platforms which would allow same codebase to serve both platforms. Rumors also suggest that this means iTunes is going to be broken apart.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is going to replace iTunes on Mac at WWDC with three separate and more specific apps. These include Music, TV, and Podcasts, which are the same apps available for iOS.
Apple has been bloating iTunes for years, and it has become a place for not only music, but movies, podcasts, as well as managing your iDevices. The update is going to bring more cohesion between iOS and macOS, and means that we are also step closer to iOS apps on Macs.
The United States and China have resumed trade talks at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Huawei, of course, have been eagerly waiting for Trump and Xi to meet, and it seems that they have caught a good break.
While Apple has mastered some parts of the software world, you might give App Store as an example, it has been, and is still, first and foremost a hardware company.
Apple Music has reached 60 million paying subscribers, according to services & software boss Eddy Cue.
